Acker made his breakthrough with feature debut "9," which was produced by Tim Burton, Timur Bekmambetov and Jim Lemley, and distributed by Focus Features in association with Relativity Media.

Like "9," "Deep" is set in a post-apocalypse world, devastated by World War III. But here what's left of humanity shelters undersea in the hulks of sunken ships. The action adventure turns on Sullivan, a captain of a nuclear sub. He makes contact with a splinter group of superior scientific intelligence, the Wayfarers, which has the power to save the earth. But that could come at a terrible cost.

"Deep" was written by Jack Barton Mitchell, and produced by Brown Bag's Darragh O'Connell and Gregory R. Little, who heads Brown Bag's L.A. production office.

Its working budget is E15 million ($18.7 million), high-end for Europe but low for the U.S., O'Connell said at a Work in Progress presentation Friday at the Annecy festival.